Dornik hasn’t done half bad for someone who started out drumming in singer Jessie Ware’s band and seemed unlikely to find success in his own right. In the two years since he released single Something About You, the singer and producer has joined Ware on slick, forward-thinking label PMR and picked up comparisons to Frank Ocean, Miguel and the Weeknd. Like them, he makes shimmery pop inflected with elements of R&B and heavily indebted to a breathy, 1980s Michael Jackson vocal style. It’s both wonderfully retro and crisply modern. Dornik’s musings on love are less sexual and druggy than the Weeknd’s, drifting politely over synths on Stand in Your Line or urging an unnamed love interest to ditch her current man on Mountain. The whole album brings to mind an 80s Hollywood fantasy, all swaying palm trees at inky dusk and music blaring out of convertible cars in the summer heat. It’s a polished, well-crafted debut.
